Gilbert Stuart
1755-1828
Gilbert Stuart was born in North Kingston, R.I., on Dec. 3, 1755. At the age of 13 or 14 he studied art with the Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander in Newport. With Alexander he made a tour of the South and a journey to Edinburgh, where Alexander died in 1772. For about a year Stuart remained, poverty-stricken, in Scotland, but finally, working as a sailor, he managed to get back to America. There he executed a few portraits in a hard limner fashion. With the Revolutionary War threatening, his family, who had Tory sympathies, fled to Nova Scotia, and Stuart sailed for London, where he remained from 1775 to 1787. For the first 4 or 5 years, Stuart served as the first assistant of American expatriate painter Benjamin West, who had rescued him from poverty. From the first, Stuart showed an interest only in portraiture and had no desire to go into the branch of history painting West practiced. After his apprenticeship, Stuart became London's leading portrait painter, next to Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, whose style he emulated, as in a rare full-length portrait of William Grant of Congalton as The Skater (ca. 1782). For a while Stuart lived in splendor, but being a bad businessman and a profligate spender, he was in constant debt. He lived in Ireland from 1787 to 1792 and then returned to America to make a fortune, Related Paintings of Gilbert Stuart :. | WashingtonAtDorchesterHeightsByStuart | John Quincy Adams. | Portrait of George Washington | Thomas Jefferson | George Washington | Related Artists: Gustav BauernfeindGerman Painter, 1848-1904 Jean-Baptiste Francois DesoriaJean-Baptiste François Desoria (1758-1832).
Both once enjoyed considerable renown among the elite of the Paris Enlightenment; today their names are barely known. Jean-Baptiste François Desoria (1758-1832), born in Paris, was, with the exception of some portraiture, primarily a history painter in the Neo-Classical style of his slightly older contemporary, Jacques-Louis David. Constance Pipelet, born in Nantes in 1767, was a surgeon's wife (later divorced) turned writer and librettist; she was noted primarily for her opera Sapho and her Epître aux femmes ( Epistle to the Women). Like her French predecessor of some four centuries earlier, Christine de Pizan, Constance Pipelet celebrated in writing the intellectual achievements of women. MASTER of Saint CeciliaItalian Byzantine Style Painter, active 1300-1320
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